The impact of manufacturing an obsolete product on the environment has become a significant issue. The materials used in the manufacture of most electronics products consume non-renewable resources such as oil, gas, and metals. At the same time, regulations are restricting exposure to materials used during manufacture because of adverse health effects and the cost associated with waste disposal is increasing. Many municipalities have imposed voluntary recycling programs for plastics that have demonstrated that recycling can have a positive effect on the environment by minimizing the waste and eliminating potentially toxic material in landfills.
Many countries are enacting legislation which requires the manufacturers of electronics equipment to take back and dispose of used products. Similar legislation for battery cells, including non-rechargeable alkaline cells and rechargeable nickel-cadmium cells, is in effect or is being considered in the United States, and manufacturers are now responsible for the final disposition of their products after the useful life. It is not a great stretch of the imagination to assume that companies will one day become responsible for the post consumer disposition of all products.
There are many reasons for recovering used products, such as regulatory, environmental impact, image in the marketplace, acting as a responsible corporate citizen, or simply recovering expensive raw materials. Present technology is heavily weighted to designing the product for ease of manufacturing. This philosophy, known as design for manufacturing (DFM) focuses on ways to make the product easier to assemble, thus making it lower cost. However, this approach often results in a product that is difficult or impossible to recycle, because the product cannot be easily disassembled. Fastening schemes such as ultrasonic welding and snap-fit joints are easy to assemble in the manufacturing facility, and make a rugged, reliable package. The very ruggedness of these fastening schemes also make them impervious to disassembly. For example, ultrasonically welded packages must be sawed in half or otherwise cracked or destroyed in order to open them. Snap-fit joints, the salvation of DFM, are considered to be `one-way` joints, because they are difficult, it not impossible, to open once actuated. In the prior art, snap-fit joints are typically designed to be unseparable, with the force required to separate the two components being a function of the design. When viewed from this new perspective of recovery and recycling, these existing joining methods are not desirable, because they require expensive labor to open the packages. Clearly, a need exists for an improved package design that can be easily and inexpensively disassembled.